we're working with a popular website platform vendor, which is a great platform for building websites, and they have a vibrant community of third party vendors who integrate with their platform.
However, this vendor apparently does not have a checklist, acceptance criteria, that a plugin must contain in order to be accepted into their marketplace. As such, the team has worked on this for several months, with the plugin getting rejected and a new "checklist" being produced by the vendor.
The vendor refuses to produce a definitive, final checklist.
Since we're implementing Scrum in our organization, and for many of us it is our first time actually using it, I'm trying to understand more about how to handle items of great uncertainty. If we commit to "Integration with website vendor X's marketplace", and we continue to fail to deliver this in our two week sprint due to forces outside our control, how should management and the team look at this?
- Does it mean the team didn't complete what it committed to?
- Wouldn't this be considered a "failure" to deliver what was promised?
Since this item cannot be estimated for a 2 week sprint, how would the team deal with this?
- Should the team just keep recycling this back to the product backlog and selecting it again for another sprint, knowing that the velocity for this particular item won't be counted until it is done?
- What do you do in cases of such extreme uncertainty due to a third party vendor's inability to clarify requirements?